1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to business practice management systems and, more particularly, to a practice management software solution for increased efficiency.
2. Description of the Background
The challenge today for professional practices, including law offices, accounting firms and physician practices, is to maintain a high degree of client satisfaction while keeping finances healthy. Technology can help to meet this challenge, but only if the technology is managed efficiently. There are various existing software solutions for managing various aspects of various types of business practices, including inventory, employees, client accounts, and records. Unfortunately, most of these solutions are task-specific. Consequently, practice managers must compile a collection of different software packages, and a number of expensive, inadequate, mismatched tools that quickly become obsolete. Global practice management is a more difficult task.
Every practice has, at a foundation level, the need and participation of:
                Vendors or suppliers who supply the resources essential to run the businesses        Clients, businesses or entities wanting to buy goods and services        Employees who make sure to run the business and who have up-to-date skills and knowledge related to the business.        Management of business daily functions: accounting, legal, insurances, Human Resources (HR), compliance, Record keeping, etc.        A need to do marketing and out reach programs        Social and networking needs        Recharging, leisure, entertainment needs.        
As a specific example, the participants in a delinquent loan resolution (a “workout”) include the borrower, loan servicer, lender/investor, guarantor/insurer, and various support-providing vendors, or third-party data providers. The lender may be a government institution such as Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae), or private investors, plus a loan guarantor or insurer including the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and US Veteran's Administration (VA), and private mortgage insurer.
In standard practice, when a mortgage loan is defaulted, the loan servicer will send a default package to the borrower detailing their options. A loan servicer will follow up and attempt to resolve a delinquent loan by multiple telephone attempts. Borrower contact or the lack thereof gives rise to the need for information from other sources, such as support-providing vendors; like a borrower contact agent, property inspector, appraiser, credit history repository, escrow/settlement agent, real estate broker, attorney, title company, and so forth. Each attempt to contact a borrower, every borrower contact, and every supporting vendor order and corresponding product gives rise to a data entry documenting the contact, order, or product.
If the borrower is willing to discuss their situation, initial information relating to the delinquent loan is collected by the loan servicer, contact vendor or Counseling Agency. The information is assembled and then passed to a loan service counselor, whose responsibilities include a full borrower interview, credit counseling, financial evaluation; and pre-qualification of likely loan dispositions (unassisted reinstatement, assisted reinstatement, impossibility of reinstatement), and ultimate creation of an appropriate workout solution. All of this must be completed in compliance with lender/investor and guarantor/insurer's requirements; management consultation; dissemination of recommendations; workout-plan approval from interested parties; and implementing the workout plan.
From the Mortgage Insurer/Investor perspective, the most crucial element to all this is time. In order to establish an adequate coverage ratio for defaulted loans, Mortgage Insurers/Investor are required to maintain sizable loan loss funds. The size of these funds is derived from an estimate of loan delinquencies based on a rolling average of actual loan delinquencies. As soon as a loan is indicated as in default, it is added to the estimate and for as long as it is carried on the books as a default loan it increases the Mortgage Insurer's/Investor's reserve requirement. Every dollar of reserve carries an opportunity cost, and so it is in the Mortgage Insurer/Investor's best interest to resolve default loans as soon as possible. Moreover, statistically the odds of collecting on a defaulted loan decrease dramatically with time. With existing procedures, the Mortgage Insurer/Investor working with loan services and all other participants typically require 60-90 days to workout a loan, or an average of 8-10 months to navigate the foreclosure process. Moreover, of all the delinquent borrower contacts made by loan servicers, only ten to twenty percent (10-20%) are successful. The Mortgage Insurer/Investor can mitigate their loss funds and losses considerably by reducing this timeframe, closing default workouts, providing additional financial assistance where needed to consummate loss mitigation deals, and clearing the loans from their books more quickly, all of which is possible with an electronic workflow platform.
Similar dynamics exist in the heathcare arena where the participants include the hospital, attending physician, payor (insurer), patient, and various support-providing vendors, or third-party data providers. Healthcare costs can be substantially mitigated by reducing the time to diagnosis and treatment, and this too is possible with an electronic workflow platform.
As a consequence, there is presently a great need for a system that is easily accessible by the various parties that both facilitates information gathering, integration, and analysis, and leads to the culmination of a guideline-compliant loan workout that mitigates losses to all effected parties. Specifically in the loan processing context, there is a need for a system that facilitates the simultaneous endeavors of continuous workout efforts and expedient foreclosure processing by all participants, while providing unique, high-level and detailed loan-level views of the servicing activities so that all parties to various concurrent processes are apprised of the loan status in real-time. There is also a need for a solution that tracks the entire spectrum of defaulted-loan servicing activities, through the default-loan Case Management process stages of:
1. Collection
2. Loss Mitigation
3. Foreclosure
4. Eviction
5. Bankruptcy
6. Claims
7. REO (real estate owned) Acquisition and Maintenance (REO is a class of property owned by a lender, typically a bank, after an unsuccessful sale at a foreclosure auction)
8. REO Disposition
all on the same processing platform using an open architecture for data exchange with the various participants and the various third party applications used by those participants at the various stages of Case Management.
What is needed is a business practice management system that manages the foregoing in an integrated fashion, has the flexibility to be implemented with a wide variety of other business practices such as default-loan servicing and healthcare, is easily adaptable to changes in needs of business practices, and can be delivered to the business practice without requiring investment in equipment or products. The present invention fulfills these needs by providing features, applications and services focused toward just these tasks. Simply, it is a software solution for maintaining a healthy business environment (healthy margins, happy clients and employees and willing suppliers with a established name and credibility to the business).